traditions, the same book-literature from the same schools. The far less sophisticated Aramaic literatures of the East — the truly Magian, written and thought in the language of Jesus and his companions — were cut off from coöperating in the life of the Church. They could not be read, they dropped out of sight, and finally they were forgotten altogether. After all, notwithstanding that the Persian Scriptures were set down in Avestan and the Jewish in Hebrew, the language of their authors and exegetes; the language of the whole Apocalyptic from which the teachings of Jesus, and secondarily the teachings about Jesus, sprang; the language, lastly, of the scholars of all the Mesopotamian universities — was Aramaic. All this vanished from the field of view, to be replaced by Plato and Aristotle, both of whom were taken up, worked upon in common, and misunderstood in common by the Schoolmen of the two cult-Churches.
A final step in this direction was attempted by a man who was the equal of Paul in organizing talent and greatly his superior in intellectual creativeness, but who was inferior to him in the feeling for possibilities and actualities, and consequently failed to achieve his grandly conceived schemes — Marcion.[1] He saw in Paul's creation and its consequences only the basis on which to found the true religion of salvation. He was sensible of the absurdity of two religions that were unreservedly at war with one another possessing the same Holy Writ — namely, the Jewish canon. To us to-day it seems almost inconceivable that this should have been, but in fact it was so, for a century — but we have to remember what a sacred text meant in every kind of Magian religiousness. In these texts Marcion saw the real "conspiracy against the truth" and the most urgent danger for the doctrines intended by Jesus and, in his view, not yet actualized. Paul the prophet had declared the Old Testament as fulfilled and concluded — Marcion the founder pronounced it defeated and cancelled. He strove to cut out everything Jewish, down to the last detail. From end to end he was fighting nothing but Judaism. Like every true founder, like every religiously creative period, like Zarathustra, the prophets of Israel, like the Homeric Greeks, and like the Germans converted to Christianity, he transformed the old gods into defeated powers.[2] Jehovah as the Creator-God, the Demiurge, is the "Just" and therefore the Evil: Jesus as the incarnation of the Saviour-God in this evil creation is the "alien" — that is, the good Principle.[3] The foundation of Magian, and in particular Persian, feeling is perfectly unmistakable here. Marcion came from Sinope, the old capital of that Mithra-
- ↑ C. 85-155. See the recent work of Harnack, Marcion: Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott (1921). [Harnack's article "Marcion" in Ency. Brit., XI ed., is dated 1910. — Tr.]
- ↑ Harnack, op. cit., pp. 136, et seq.; N. Bonwetsch, Grundr. d. Dogmengesch. (1919), p. 45, et seq.
- ↑ This is one of the profoundest ideas in all religious history, and one that must for ever remain inaccessible to the pious average man. Marcion's identification of the "Just" with the Evil enables him in this sense to oppose the Law of the Old Testament to the Evangel of the New.
